Using Medical Informatics Services

Philosophy

Our goal is to improve healthcare and advance biomedical discovery through medical informatics.

The division offers services to investigators and organizations within and outside KUMC on grant-funded, chargeback-based projects, and other collaborative funding models for developing/deploying/supporting applications, as well as integrating and exploring health data produced by clinical, administrative, quality, and biomedical research systems. Our team strives to provide cost-effective, scalable, open solutions that can be deployed within the KUMC environment, your organization's IT infrastructure, or utilize cloud computing platforms; maximizing the portability and impact of our methods to advance biomedical informatics.

Medical informatics is at its best when we provide systems, training, consultation, or collaboration that allows your research to grow in new directions that were not possible or cost prohibitive before. Our approach also helps healthcare providers and systems understand their care processes, quality, and create a learning healthcare system.

We want to be your partner: Informatics is not a spectator sport. When you engage with our team, it helps us devise new solutions to advance state of the art in biomedical informatics. Similarly, training and collaboration with our team can help your research or organizational clinical effectiveness.

We know you're busy: We are also happy when researchers use our informatics systems as independent, informatics savvy investigators and don't require training, consultation and collaboration.

Informatics Systems, Training, Consulation, and Collaboration

Informatics systems (underwritten): Just as organizations don't charge for each email sent, we provide informatics systems supported by Frontiers and the University of Kansas Medical Center as a resource to Frontiers investigators and KUMC affiliates. We just ask that your research cites the funding sources and prior work that built and supports these systems you enjoy (see Attribution and Authorship). Further information about systems are available at the Frontiers Biomedical Informatics Section.

We hold bi-weekly walk-in clinics open to all, every other Tuesday in the Student Center room 3001D. Check the Frontiers calendar for the next sessions and by signing up you can help us prepare for your specific concerns.

Consultation (underwritten):

Are you developing a grant or proposal? Have funding? Seeking support for your thesis/dissertation?

To begin discussions, please submit a request. We will get back to you within three business days to discuss your project.

In general, we provide consultation around the following topics:

building a clinical registry

data warehousing and data integration with electronic medical records and other systems

It could be after this meeting that we mutually determine your team should use the underwritten informatics systems and training.

We work with you to develop your grant or proposal and the budget/approach for funding informatics services.

Medical Informatics is committed to providing support for KUMC students who seek to incorporate informatics into their research and career. If your research is aligned with our roadmap and objectives we will discuss with your advisor the degree to which informatics and your department might support your research. (Note could include as an example Saddam Kanaan's papers once they are indexed on pubmed).

You decide to work with us on your grant or proposal; we will develop a statement of work following one of two collaboration/service models outlined below.

Collaboration/Service Models

Fees for Service. We offer an hourly fee-for-service for all informatics services. This may be the preferred model custom solution development, and integration where it is often difficult for both investigators and informaticians to place a fixed time/cost on certain open-ended questions or underspecified requirements. We place a high value on transparency and attempt to provide accurate effort forecasting and use a software project management system for defining milestones, tasks, and time-tracking. Standard, staff hourly fee-for-service rates for Frontiers CTSA affiliates is $75/hour and $60/hour for Frontiers pilot grant award recipients.

Research Collaboration - Medical Informatics Personnel on Grants

Medical Informatics faculty/staff member is a co-investigator on grants submitted and awarded.

Medical Informatics personnel % time on a grant should be represenative of the actual effort required to meet deliverables. (In no case should staff effort be less than five percent.)

Attribution and Authorship

Attribution

If you used informatics services (e.g.: REDCap, HERON) or consultation was used for the research described in your manuscript, you need to cite the support of Frontiers, our regional CTSA award. Instructions here.

The basis of financial support should be the time/effort spent on a project and the basis for authorship should be whether [the consultant] has made a scientific contribution to the project." If appropriate, it is often beneficial to include informaticians as authors in publications since those are considered as the most critical evidence of long-term informatics collaborations in most current grant funding reviews.

By JAMA's criteria for authorship for statistical experts involved in data analysis and interpretation, an analytical consultant is a co-author if (1) he/she took part in the drafting of the manuscript or (2) he/she was involved in a critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content.Above all, it is important for the researcher and informatics personnel working on the project to agree on criteria for authorship early in their collaboration.

In cases where informatics core personal contributed to the intellectual development of the project, provided analysis of the data beyond that which would have been otherwise possible for the investigator's team, or authored any component of the text, authorship should be provided on the resulting manuscript or abstract.

Examples of scientific contributions are the following:

Facility staff develop new methods to meet the project's needs, or combine existing techniques in a novel way.

Facility staff have a significant role in designing the study.

Facility staff write part of the manuscript other than a standard paragraph or two describing which methods were used.

Facility staff are asked to critique an initial draft and spend a considerable amount of time suggesting alternative wording and presentation of results.

Facility staff provide data analysis along with interpretation of results.

General Terms and Conditions for Services

More specific terms, conditions, and licensing can be defined, but our general approach is as follows:

Payment: Client agrees to pay for any services in accordance with the contract/professional services agreement governing the project. Unless otherwise specified in advance, all payments will be due and payable within thirty (30) days of the date of the invoice. Payment shall be deemed late if not received within such time and shall be subject to interest equal to 2% per month, together with all costs and expenses (including without limitation reasonable attorneys' fees and disbursements and court costs) incurred by the KUMC Medical Informatics staff in collecting such overdue amounts.

Confidentiality: Both parties each agree to maintain in confidence and not disclose to third parties any confidential information that is disclosed to one by the other party. This includes pricing information and all project communications.

Software Licensing: The creation of a clinical data repository for a client or any related software development involving i2b2 and/or HERON will be subject to the terms and conditions of the following open sources licenses:

REDCap Use: Per the "Terms of Use for the "REDCap Non-Profit End-User License Agreement," Vanderbilt University is the owner of all rights, title and interest in and to the Research Electronic Data Capture Software also known as "REDCap". REDCap may be used for non-commercial research purposes only. If installed on portable devices, the source code must be encrypted to protect the software from unauthorized use or disclosure. Neither the software nor any derivative works may be distributed to or shared with any third party party for any purpose. Please click here to view the full Terms of Use.